Carbon Foam Lightning and Thermal Protection System

The feasibility of using a low-cost, coal-based carbon foam (CFOAM) for providing lightning and thermal protection for ground-based missile systems was demonstrated during Phase I.Touchstone proposes to build on the Phase I efforts and take the development of this system to the next stage.During Phase I, a concept was developed that will provide sufficient thermal protection to the underlying materials and provide the ability to dissipate the energy from a lightning strike while reducing the weight by 60% compared to the current state-of-the-art.This was done by taking advantage of the higher electrical conductivity of CFOAM compared to the baseline material.This promising concept will be further developed during the Phase II effort by building and testing panels and by feeding the test data back into the models from Phase I in order to find the best combination and arrangement of materials.The Phase II effort will also include a study to determine the best method of configuring the solution in order to minimize the production and installation costs.